Hector and the Search for Happiness, by François Lelord

Hector is a successful young psychiatrist. He’s very good at treating patients in real need of his help. But many people he sees have no health problems: they’re just deeply dissatisfied with their lives. Hector can’t do much for them, and it’s beginning to depress him. In this extract, follow him to China in his search for what it means to be happy.

Read an extract.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman

In this ingenious and spellbinding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told. Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who Jesus was and asks the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after the final page is turned. Above all, this book is about how stories become stories.

This is How, by M.J. Hyland

All actions have consequences. This is how life goes. Patrick is a loner, an intelligent but disturbed young man struggling to find his place in the world. He ventures out on his own, and, as he begins to find happiness, he commits an act of violence that sends his life horribly and irreversibly out of control. But should a person’s life be judged by a single bad act? This is How is a compelling and macabre journey into the dark side of human existence and a powerful meditation on the nature of guilt and redemption.

Sum, by David Eagleman

In this startling book, David Eagleman shows us forty possibilities of life beyond death. With wit and humanity, he asks the key questions about existence, hope, technology and love. These short stories are full of big ideas and bold imagination.

Anything that tells us, convincingly, that this really may be the best of all possible worlds has something big going for it
Guardian

This stunningly original book is little more than 100 pages long. You can get through it in an hour, but you’d be mad to hurry, and you will certainly want to return to it many times . . . Sum has the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius. It seems exquisitely adapted to fill the contemporary longing for a kind of secular holy book.
Geoff Dyer, Observer

Under the Skin, by Michel Faber

Isserley spends most of her time driving. But why is she so interested in picking up hitchhikers? And why are they always male, well-built and along? An utterly unpredictable and macabre mystery, Michel Faber’s debut novel is an outstanding piece of fiction that will stay with you long after you have turned the last page.

The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, by Michel Faber

Siân, troubled by dark dreams and seeking distraction, joins an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey. The abbey’s one hundred and ninety-nine steps link the twenty-first century with the ruins of the past and Siân is swept into a mystery involving a long-hidden murder, a fragile manuscript in a bottle and a cast of most peculiar characters. Equal parts historical thriller, romance and ghost story, this is an ingenious literary page-turner and is completely unforgettable.

The Bradshaw Variations, by Rachel Cusk

Since leaving his job to look after Alexa, his eight-year-old daughter, Thomas Bradshaw has found the structure of his daily piano practice and the study of musical form bring a nourishment to these difficult middle years. His pursuit of a more artistic way of life shocks and irritates his parents and his in-laws. Why has he swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife who has accepted a demanding full-time university job? How can this be good for Alexa and for the family as a whole?

Tonie tunes herself out of domestic life, into the harder, headier world of work where long-since forgotten memories of herself are awakened. She soon finds herself outside their tight family circle and alive to previously unimaginable possibilities.

Over the course of a year full of crisis and revelation, we follow the fortunes of Thomas, Tonie, his brothers and their families: Howard, the older, more successful brother and his gregarious wife, Claudia; and Leo, lacking confidence, propped up by Susie, his sharp-tongued, heavy-drinking wife. At the head of the family, the ageing Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.

The Bradshaw Variations is a powerful novel about how our choices and our loves and the family life we build will always be an echo – a variation – of a theme played out in our own childhood. The novel, Cusk’s seventh, shows a prize-winning writer at the height of her powers.

The Widow’s Tale, by Mick Jackson

A newly widowed woman has done a runner. She just jumped in her car, abandoned her (very nice) house in north London and kept on driving until she reached the Norfolk coast. Now she’s rented a tiny cottage and holed herself away there, if only to escape the ceaseless sympathy and insincere concern.

She’s not quite sure, but thinks she may be having a bit of a breakdown. Or perhaps this sense of dislocation is perfectly normal in the circumstances. All she knows is that she can’t sleep and may be drinking a little more than she ought to.

But as her story unfolds we discover that her marriage was far from perfect. That it was, in fact, full of frustration and disappointment, as well as one or two significant secrets, and that by running away to this particular village she might actually be making her own personal pilgrimage.

By turns elegiac and highly comical, The Widow’s Tale conjures up this most defiantly unapologetic of narrators as she begins to pick over the wreckage of her life and decides what has real value and what she should leave behind.

The Whole Wide Beauty, by Emily Woof

Katherine Freeman is living a conventional life: married with a small child and working as a part-time teacher, she has drifted far from her former life as a dancer. Burying the nagging sense that part of her has gone missing, she navigates the world in a dream, drawn one way then another by those who depend on her.

David, her ageing father, has secrets of his own. His desperate drive to raise funds for a Poetry Foundation in the Lake District covers up his sense of what is missing. Disappointed by his daughter’s abandoning of her artistic life, he has no idea how much they have in common.

Then Katherine meets Stephen Jericho, a talented poet and friend of her father’s. They embark on an affair which is less about them than about passion itself, sexual passion but also an elemental connection with life.

In this powerful debut, Emily Woof addresses the human need to engage. Her unique descriptive talent has the ability to make the reader look afresh at even the most familiar things. This is a brilliant novel about life’s choices: love and marriage, art and commerce, ideals and compromise.

Stardust, by Joseph Kanon

Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier returns from war to the news that his filmmaker brother Daniel has died in mysterious circumstances — the papers say it was an accident, but others suspect suicide. Daniel was a heroic figure who helped many prominent German intellectuals escape Europe before the war and then settled in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife, Liesl. Why would a man with such a bright future take his own life? Could he have been murdered?

Ben is determined to uncover the truth and uses his friendship with Continental Studios boss Sol Lasner to penetrate the maze of studio politics and Hollywood secrets. Beneath the surface shine of the movie business lies a darker world where even the biggest stars and star-makers are vulnerable to old secrets being exposed and old loyalties tested…

Coward at the Bridge, by James Delingpole

Trapped in a cupboard with a nubile blonde nymphomaniac; crossing the Waal under a hail of fire with the US paratroops of 82nd airborne; rattling in a jeep through the Dutch countryside with the men of 1st Airborne Recce Squadron; trying to take out a self-propelled gun with a ruddy useless PIAT. It’s all in a day’s work for Lt Dick Coward and Sgt Tom Price.

After the horrors of D-Day, they find themselves plunged into even greater chaos and mayhem as they land in the deceptively tranquil countryside around Arnhem, Holland, as part of Operation Market Garden. What should be a pushover – the ingenious scheme that everyone thinks will end the war by Christmas – turns into Britain’s biggest military disaster of the Second World War. But if it’s a cock-up, by golly is it a glorious one. Rarely if ever have Allied soldiers acquitted themselves better than the British, Americans and Poles, as they fought against the might of the SS, in their bid to capture ‘The Bridge Too Far.”

As usual Coward and Price are in the thick of it. They have to be. If Coward doesn’t get a VC this time, he’ll be booted off the family estate for good, and stand no chance of winning the heart of the fickle, dangerously beguiling Gina.

Will he get the medal? Will he get the girl? Will Price be driven so mad by his master’s Bertie Wooster-like stupidity that he ends up throttling him first?

The Stopping Place, by Helen Slavin

How far would you go to hide your past?

For a woman who wants to remain invisible, a shelving job at a quiet suburban library provides the perfect cover. Ruby sees a lot from behind the stacks — maybe even enough to bring her out of hiding. And that could be a problem. Because everyone has a history, especially someone who’s trying desperately to forget their own…

Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott

In October 1931, a station agent found two large trunks abandoned in LA’s South Pacific Train Station. What he found inside ignited one of the most scandalous tabloid sensations of the decade.

Inspired by this notorious true crime, Bury Me Deep is the story of Marion Seeley, a young woman abandoned in Phoenix by her husband. At the medical clinic where she finds a job, Marion becomes fast friends with Louise, a vivacious nurse, and her roommate, Ginny. Before long, the demure Marion is swept up in the exuberant life of the girls, who supplement their scant income by entertaining the town’s most powerful men with wild parties. At one of these events, Marion meets – and falls hard for-the charming Joe Lanigan, a local rogue and politician on the rise, whose ties to all three women bring events to a dramatic and deadly collision.

A story born of Depression-era desperation and Jazz Age nostalgia, Bury Me Deep – with its hothouse of jealousy, illicit sex, and shifting loyalties – is a timeless portrait of the dark side of desire.

Summer Circles, by Sarah Jackman

With her strange albino appearance and shy nature, Hannah Ruland is content to lead a sheltered life in rural Norfolk, under the watchful eye of her fiercely protective mother and brother.

But all is set to change when Hannah meets the enigmatic Toby and befriends the crop circle followers, who are studying the mysterious patterns that have appeared in a local wheat field. For the first time, Hannah is beginning to engage with the world. But for some reason, Hannah’s mother is showing no interest in her daughter’s activities, disappearing for hours on end, being uncharacteristically bad-tempered and neglecting her beloved garden.

And then Hannah’s brother’s new girlfriend arrives on the scene. Desperate to fit in, Kirsten stirs up conflicting emotions and long-buried resentments among the Ruland family. As the long, hot summer draws to a close, the tensions stir up to boiling point – and a confrontation seems inevitable.

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